Guiding One-Handed Part 1

Western horse show disciplines for senior horses are to be ridden one handed. The rule book allows the use of only one hand to guide your horse. A big problem for some people…….. and some horses.
If you have this problem, you have two choices. Sell all your horses before they turn six years old or change your training program and learn how to ride one handed. If you take the later choice, and change your program you had better do it a long time before the horse turns six years old. The best way is to start a one handed program from the first day that you sit on his back and continue with that program throughout his life. If you have any skill, then by the time you are forced to show him one handed, you will be able to, comfortably. Or you can do it the bad way, spend the first few years of his life teaching a two-handed program, then when he about learns that, switch to a one-handed program. Confuse him totally. Bad idea. Lets get away from this bad idea and talk about the good idea. Use one simple program that teaches your horse and you to work effectively one-handed.
The basic point in the training of a show horse is teaching him to steer or willingly guide. It is of particular importance to the reining horse, but trail horses and western riding horses, all horses need to guide. It is important to keep it simple. No need to make it more complex than it already is. Simple means that all your horse needs to do is to stay between your reins and to move away from your legs. Fancy two-tracks, half passes, side passes are cute, be mostly unnecessary.
Use the reins to steer with. Legs help a lot, but no matter how fancy the traverse and side pass it will not help much if you go to the show and he does not guide willingly and easily with the reins. Most everybody, when they get nervous use their hands more, and their legs less, than they normally do. This is a normal human reaction. Nervous people get busy with their hands. An amateur that can control his horse just with his legs when they are at home, will seldom be able to do this at a show. Judges and spectators watching makes everyone nervous.
Guiding is what your horse must do at the show. He needs to guide in response to your hand signals. If he does not guide with one hand you are in big trouble. Trouble not only for the circles but also for the rest of the pattern since you need to use your steering to set him up in position for the stops, lead changes and spins. If he simply stays between the two reins and lopes forward when you leg him forward, you can get through the pattern. If he will move away from either rein when applied to the neck, not only can you run your circles, you can also spin. A flat spin is simply the horse moving his shoulder away from the outside rein. The stop will be better, since a straight approach is necessary for a good stop. And the lead change will work better because if his shoulder stays straight between the reins, he cannot drop his shoulder and miss the change. The steering must be “willing”. If he is resisting the bridle reins in any way the horse will stiffen up and he will not guide.
How do we teach him to guide? The wrong way is to start a program that uses two hands and a snaffle bit to plow rein left and right. It is whole different set of signals and pressures from what he must learn when it _s time to go one-handed. It will be all new for the horse and the rider, no surprise when it does not work very well.
The better way to do it is to start your training program from day one with the goal of guiding with one hand. Still start with the snaffle, but teach from the onset to move away from the one handed pressure. The pressures learned at home must be exactly like the pressures used at the show, so that later when they are applied at the show they do not scare him. The horse eventually must be shown in one hand so he must learn to deal with the rider using only one hand. This takes a long time, so you need to start it at the beginning of his life.
How do we simply teach him to do this? Easy, teach him to stay between the reins. When your rein hand goes left, he needs to turn left. Start by simply making him move forward on a loose rein and then give him the signal that you want him to learn. Not a punishment, not a huge pull that forces him to turn, but a signal. He needs to learn to respond to a light rein with one hand. He cannot learn the signal if he never gets it. So start by giving him the signal that you want him to learn. Give the same signal to the young horse as you would to the old horse even the young horse knows nothing. Since you want him to eventually learn to respond to a one handed signal (neck rein), start the lesson with a gentle signal from one hand. Do it every time you turn him….every time.
The horse will learn to guide if you start by giving him the signal with one hand and then use what ever else it takes to get him to move a little in the correct direction and then release the pressure. That means start with one hand and then use your other hand, your legs, your weight or whatever you want to achieve the correct direction. But do not forget to relieve the pressure after a very little success so the horse can associate the pressure release with the first signal. He needs to associate release with the signal that you want him to learn, the neck rein. If your horse has 100% confidence that the pressure in his mouth will be relieved when he turns, then he will always turn and you will be able to guide him around any pattern at any speed. Simple. The hard part is giving him the 100% confidence. You have to ride 100% consistently, at every speed. That is a people problem, not a horse problem. The horse does not have to be forced to learn to be willingly guided. They learn it if the pressure is always released when he first starts to move with the neck rein.
Learning is done by associating a series of events together. Look at it from the horses’ point of view. As we are walking forward… ONE…we feel pressure on right side of neck and right corner of mouth…TWO…we walk continue to forward…THREE..more pressure now by inside (left) rein and outside leg….FOUR …pressure worries us so we walk a little faster…FIVE… we take a little step left and the pressure disappears. This is repeated 1,2,3,4,5, 1,2,3,4,5 over and over, soon the horse will take a shortcut to the end of the sequence. Instead of 1,2,3,4,5 he will go 1,3,4,5 and then 1, 4,5 and then 1,5. He remembers the sequence of events and wants to get to the end as soon as possible because this is where the pressure is released. Simple learning process. The rider must only repeat the pressures in the same sequence, often enough for the horse to learn it.
Horses do not like to be pushed with legs and pulled with reins. These are pressures that they would just as soon avoid if they can. The great skill in being a trainer is to apply these pressures in such a way that the horse can figure out how to avoid them. And in avoiding them they do what we want.
Consider the circle. A horse does not need to be bent to the inside to gallop a circle. I bet this is a shocking idea to some. Go to any reining and you will see horses that gallop with their head to the outside, some horses that gallop straight and some that gallop bent to the inside. It is your preference as to what looks nicest, but a horse can physically do either. It is important to observe that many riders work constantly on pulling the nose to the inside and spend too little time teaching the horse to stay between the two reins. This causes problems. Typically at the show the horse drops his inside shoulder and tries to make a smaller circle than the rider wants to. The rider is forced to be always trying to hold the horse to the outside of the circle. Before you can solve this problem you must consider why does it happen, what caused it? He does not stay on the big circle, he tries to make the circle smaller. Why?
We normally train in a fenced arena of some type. We ride parallel to the long walls, approach the end wall and turn either into a half or a full circle. This is repeated dozens of times per ride. ONE… down the wall, TWO… end wall approaches and we turn… THREE… ride down the other wall or circle. 1,2,3, 1,2,3 1,2,3. It does not take the horse long to learn the sequence. He learns that he has to turn in a few metres, so he shortens up the sequence to 1,3. He starts the turn too soon. This is only natural, you have turned there dozens of times already. He knows you are going to do it again. So before you pull him into the turn, he turns himself. You have taught him to do this. Good horse. BUT you think bad horse, because he did not wait for you to turn him. This is unfair to the horse. How can he learn to wait for a pressure to be applied on his mouth and neck. He knows that the pressure is coming and he knows that he has to turn, so it’s only natural for him to turn first.
This is not the end of your problem. You lift on the inside rein to make the circle bigger, but you have to turn eventually because the end wall is quickly approaching. You bump him on the inside of his mouth and then let him turn anyway, because you want to stay on your circle and not crash into the wall. You repeat this procedure with every circle bumping the inside of his mouth, very soon he will try to get away from this pressure by bending his head away from the pressure, to the outside of the circle. Now you have a horse that is loping in a circle with his head in an unnatural position bent to the outside. And you trained him to do to this.
The typical solution to this problem is to try and lift the inside shoulder with the inside rein. Take two hands, elevate the inside rein, lay the rein on the neck and lift a little. This pushes the horse out on a bigger circle and we feel we have solved the problem. But when we go back to one hand the problem is still there, the horse still drops his shoulder. Lifting the inside shoulder of a horse with the inside rein, while sitting on the horse is similar to trying to lift yourself off the ground by pulling up on your boot laces. It is not very effective. Even if it does temporarily help, the fact remains that if you start holding him up in the circle, you will always have to hold him up, and how can you do that with one hand and a reasonably loose rein? Remember we are supposed to show our reining horses with one hand and we score higher if we have a reasonably loose rein. Rather than the rider trying to hold him up in the circle it is better to teach the horse to stand up straight alone. We do this by teaching him to run straight and to stay straight between the reins, not bent.
A better way to solve the circle problem is to teach him to respect the neck rein. He needs to learn that he is safe when he is straight between the two equal reins and that if there is only one rein on the neck he should move his shoulder away from that rein. You teach him to move his shoulder by simply making him move away from the rein. That means travel in the opposite direction from the pressure. Remember the important part of the horse to control here is his shoulder, not his neck or nose. Where the shoulder goes, the horse goes. Do not be satisfied with thinking that you have lifted the shoulder, pay attention to your direction of travel. If you lay the right rein on his neck, do not take the pressure away until he goes to the left. Every time, no compromises. You cannot do this by staying in a right circle. If you are on a right circle you must change to a left circle (or part of left circle) before you release the pressure. Otherwise he will not learn that in order to get away from the rein pressure he must move his shoulder away from it. Check yourself, if you are riding a circle with the inside rein pressing on his neck more than the outside rein, then you are wrong! You must make him go the other direction and then release the rein pressure. To make him move away from this rein you can use your other rein and your leg. Make him move away from the neck rein and then release the pressure. Make him happy to get away from the rein. Do not be content to let him lean on the rein for the entire circle. If you let him lean, even a little, he will learn to lean more and more until you are not strong enough to hold him up anymore. Do not confuse your poor old horse by letting him think that sometimes it is OK for him to lean on one rein. It is never OK, not for one second. Rein pressure should always mean move away from the pressure. He is reining horse, do not let him forget it.
A good practical plan is to ride more straight lines than circles. This solves the first problem of the horse anticipating the turn and dropping his shoulder. It solves the second problem of him leaning on a rein because a horse going in a straight line has to keep his shoulders even. If he deviates from the straight line you can easily fix him. Just have your reins in one hand, reins even, lift your hand until he straightens out. When his shoulders are straight put your hand down. He will appreciate you lowering your hand. It will take the pressure off of his mouth. He will learn to like going straight. Ride more straight lines than circles. Ride squares instead of circles. Do not follow the walls. Tell your horse when to turn, tell him how far to turn, then tell him to go straight, and then put your hand down. Make the straight line comfortable for him. More comfortable than the turn. The horse always try to get to the more comfortable place, so let him learn to prefer the straight line. By preferring the straight line he will also prefer the bigger circle, not the smaller circle. He will not drop his shoulder anymore. The problem is solved.
Most of this training is done with one hand. This is a good thing because we need to eventually show the horse with one hand. He cannot learn to be controlled with one hand when you always train with two hands. Ride with one at hand home. Even a young horse needs to ridden as much as possible with the initial signals coming from one hand. He will not learn what these signals mean unless you use them. He will learn the maneuvers slower if he first learns how to respond to two hands and then later, is forced to forget two hands and learn a new set of one handed commands. Give the initial signal soft and friendly so that he is not scared by it, but hard enough that it causes him to seek relief. Then use all of your other tools (other hand, legs, weight, walls etc.) to get him to move in the desired frame or direction and then release the original pressure. That is how he will learn to be a reining horse. One hand gives the signal and two hands to show the way. When we use two hands, move them in unison and keep your hands as close together as the situation allows. In this way they will feel more like a one handed signal to the horse. But remember often the situation requires two hands working independently and wide apart. Do not restrict your effectiveness by rules, but remember the guidelines. For example, do not correct your horse at the show with two hands. He knows the difference between one hand and two hands. Do not teach him that he does not have to guide with one hand. Learn to correct him with one hand.
In order to solve your problems observe what your horse does. Look for behavior that is not natural. Anything that he would not do if he were loose and without a rider has been learned from outside pressures. For example, horses do not naturally run in one direction with there heads pointed in another. If your horse lopes circles with his head extreme to the outside and his shoulder trying to get to the center of the circle, you probably trained him to do it. He did not learn it by watching other horses, or by reading a book. He is just a horse, he learns by simply trying to keep away from the pressures that are put on him. The pressures that the rider intentionally or unintentionally apply. Decide why the horse does what he does, what pressures cause this behavior. Teach him to seek the correct form by adding and removing pressure so that he wants to go to the position that you want.
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